What is all this, now?
Over the past couple days I have been doing a lot of digging through the archives of the-spot.net in order to create a better archive, and facilitate making changes to the site’s code.
In doing all this, I realized that the last version of tsn is antiquated and hasn’t even been given any kind of face-lift treatment since 2011, which is when the last copyright date was changed. However, even that change was only cosmetic, and was for a single file.
When we first started tsn, I had a lot of help from @Chucksplatt, and referenced his site The Brotherhood of Splatt for many points of inspiration and guidance in the layout of tsn. Some of the forum bucketing was similar, and the forum content style was similar – though, due to member difference, the forum content itself varied widely over the years as people came and went.
However, at the time tsn was just starting up, Splatt was just winding down, and Chuck (aka Hung Nguyen) had started converting his social network into a single-poster blog chronicling the lives of the various original Splatt members. I wanted to hold off on this particular path for as long as I possibly could, because I believed tsn was different.
Unfortunately, with the simultaneous rise of MySpace and Facebook, the draw to those sites and what they offered (a social network with publicity capabilities beyond word-of-mouth) and the mass migration to those services, the likes of forum-based social communities that aren’t topic specific quickly died off.
Personal response from [[Neo]]
I have to admit, even my own interest in returning to tsn as it stands now in the archives was lacking. There were particular times I would go update my journal there if something major happened in my life that warranted an update, but at some point (probably around 2008 or a little earlier) there was no one really there to read the updates.
I had originally made plans to convert the forums to a Diaspora installation, but that group has yet to get their act together and release something that can be easily installed. Along with that, it would seem Google basically stole their idea/code and called it Google+, which has had a couple iterations since then making the look & feel different, but the concept of sharing with certain circles/spores remains the same.
With the mass migration to sites like Facebook and MySpace, I felt the need/desire to create accounts on those services as well, to keep in touch with as many users as possible – just as in the early days I created a screen name on as many Instant Messaging services as I could find friends who would use them. With all those services, I needed a way to link them all together so I could basically syndicate the same information to everyone I kept in contact with – so I settled on Trillian IM and Twitter.
Once I could control all my content syndication via my Twitter account, which was set up in Trillian, there really was not much need to return to tsn’s forums to post new topics that no one would see. And so it became a content void spiral…no one posts, so no one comes, and when no one comes, no one bothers to post.
What now?
Well, I don’t know.
I decided to set up this blog to keep everything more organized and up-to-date with links to the various pieces of The-Spot.Network. And I’ve started taking a look at the code base for the various versions of tsn that I still have, so that I can possibly do something with them.
I’m not really sure what to do with the old forums site, so for now it will remain as a legacy archive of the times we had online. That seems like a solution that has worked out for the Splatt guys, so we’ll see what happens here.
I’ll also syndicate posts from this site to the-spot.net’s twitter feed and/or the Facebook page, so folks won’t miss anything…but that won’t happen until I get everything setup here first.